Quote:
Originally Posted by ChuckF
peacegirl, what is the Butt Stuff Injunction? Can you explain the Boohog Corollary?
Let's just take a shortcut here: Your father's discovered what authors have discovered since Gilgamesh. The written word is a powerful tool to help us be.
Once you pare away the veneer of incoherent nonsense babble, the Authentic Text is, at its core, a catalogue of the insecurities of a lower-middle class to middle class mediocrity living in mid-century America. It recites his various anxieties (educational, financial, sexual, etc.) and imagines a new world - a Golden Age - in which each of them is resolved. Not by dint of personal improvement, but rather by the global embrace of a worldview that, by its nature, exalts the Author and normalizes those very things at the root of the anxiety. It is an expression of a fantasy world through which the Author is elevated in the esteem of others, not only for "wisdom" the pseudophilosophical ramblings that constitute a weak glue to bind this ball of anxieties together, but also by abolition of the very norms that he perceives to deprive him of the esteem that he deserves. In the Golden Age, the Author will be accorded the same respect for which he so clearly envies Will Durant, whose bizarrely outsized presence looms so consistently large. In the Golden Age, mismatched libido will simply cease to be a problem. In the Golden Age, no one will judge him for his lack of education - a sensitivity the peculiar acuteness of which is singularly clear. In the Golden Age, teenaged boys will not face that same (completely ordinary) awkward fumbling and stinging rejection. And so on and so on.
In brief, the Authentic Text imagines a Golden Age wherein the Author is perceived by others as he wishes to be perceived in the present. He is more than the pool pro, and is also praised as a thinker, relieved of financial pressures, and freely pursues the sexual life that his id persistently demands. He imagines the life in which he has achieved those goals that reality has frustrated.
This is perfectly healthy and normal. All socialized humans grapple with their own insecurities, each in his or her own way, and much very fine literature has resulted from precisely this. The Authentic Text was the Author's way of relieving these internal pressures with the tools at his disposal. Incidentally, that is why there are so many books. He continued to write them because the underlying anxieties are perennial and evasive of resolution. (Indeed, some anxieties echo down the generations peacegirl, as from time to time you are yourself a pitiable devisee of certain of them.) Though it is wrapped in a thin veil of hackneyed chatter that is the Author's best effort to simulate academic writing - or at least Will Durant's writing - the Authentic Text is nothing more than the Author's mechanism for coping with the symptoms of existence.
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I think this is really an outstanding analysis Chuck, and, stepping out of role, I’m quite serious about this. You truly are the True Steward of the Authentic Text.
#trueStewardship 
Yes, this is what the book is about, thematically and in its substance. And it has literary merit — but only the Authentic Text, and NOT the corrupted version.
With the sex scenes restored and all of peacegirl’s turgid nonsense stripped out, the book reminds me, as I’ve noted before, of the works of Henry Miller — which are not only to this day best-sellers, but considered literary masterpieces and precursors to the works of Kerouac and the beats, among others.
Consider a book like Tropic of Cancer, which I recently took the time to reread after many years, and I was delighted to discover that it was just as good as I remembered it, and maybe even better. But what’s it really all about? A middle-aged man, an utter non-entity, struggling to cope with his inner demons in an an indifferent and even hostile world. The work is an extended literary mid-life crisis.
A middle-aged man runs away to Paris, the way someone in his early twenties might flee his paralyzingly banal and soul-crushing hometown and make the cross-country trip to San Francisco (as I did). Because he is middle-aged, though, Miller is making one last desperate stab to claim autonomy with his time running out, his own mortality very much an issue (as it is not with younger people) and acutely conscious of the “adumbrations of nothingness,” as the Japanese writer Mishima (of whom Miller was a fan) put it. Miller’s work is a book-length exercise in exorcizing his demons, resolving his anxieties, and bucking up his own inconsequential stature by demonizing his native land, the “black curse” of America.
In Paris he runs around with his good-for-nothing fellow expatriate pals from brothel to brothel or they have “cunts,” as they are persistently called, up to their seedy working-man’s hotel rooms, squalid and filled with bedbugs. In one telling scene Henry is trying to help one of his pals who is bent over a “cunt” but he either can’t get it up or can’t get it in or some such. Even if Miller did not consciously intend it, the scene is a metaphor for the inevitable arrival of impotence followed by death, or perhaps more precisely impotence
as death, an idea that curiously circles back on the thesis that the opposite of impotence, orgasm, is the “little death” — we “destroyed” each other in bed, Hemingway’s dying protagonist in Snows of Kilimanjaro tells his wife. Everything is sex, Miller writes at one point, but everything is really sex and death.
Unlike Lessans, Miller does not posit a coming Golden Age in which he is the center of everything, but rather he brings the external world down to his own level, which pretty much comes to the same thing. Miller insisted his writings were devoid of ego, because he told funny stories on himself that most people would not do, out of shame; but as Gore Vidal noted, Miller’s work is nothing but Ego — no matter what Miller does, no matter how shameful conventional morality would deem his behavior, it’s all good because Miller did it!
In one scene, Miller takes a pious Hindu boy, a “very religious” young man visiting from India, to a Paris brothel. There, the boy makes the faux pas of taking a dump in a bidet.
All hell breaks loose, of course, but later, Miller imagines the whole world reduced to this: a waiter produces a silver tray, lifts the lid, and on the tray are two pieces of shit. This, he assays, is the world. So if you live in Miller’s Shit Age or Lessans’ Golden Age, everyone will be at least as good as anyone else; and one’s existential anxieties are allayed.
Miller’s sword and shield against the world is his art, as it was for Lessans. What he did — fusing fiction with autobiography, and leavening this alloy with a curious brew of fantasy, surrealism, and philosophy or perhaps more accurately pseudo-philosophy — was not exactly new, as some critics have maintained it was. Joyce did it, and better, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; the Marquis de Sade did it, others have done it, with the autobiographical and the picaresque novel boasting a long literary thread stretching back through history. But Miller like all great artists had a unique voice.
During the course of this long thread, I have long thought — and my suspicions were confirmed when you, Chuck, brought the Authentic Text to light — that Lessans was a genius (though not in the way that peacegirl imagines).
This, of course, is at total variance with peacegirl’s claim that I “resent” Lessans or am “vindictive” toward him,
which is just pure projection on her part — it is she who resents her father, not I. If I had met the author of the Ur-penis and Harry’s sexcapades and whatnot I’m sure I would have liked him a lot. He was a witty guy, not like his dour, rigidified and fanatical scold of a daughter.
Like Miller, Lessans’ genius consists in imaginatively reconstructing the world, via the art of writing, to make it more suitable, more livable, more benign. I do this myself — I’m a fiction writer, and I’ve been published. I write to kill time, before time kills me. In doing so I reshape the meaningless and frequently malign chaos of the world, especially in the Trump era, to try to repair the psychic damage that the world has inflicted on me. To see how inventively Lessans does this, consider the mysterious Chapter 10 that peacegirl withheld from us, but which someone managed to dig up anyway.
Lessans believes we are all destined to live again and again — though this is not reincarnation! No “soul” or anything like it passes from one incarnation to the next; one’s perspective merely changes. My “I” becomes a different “I”. This is not dissimilar to older conception of death and rebirth in the mystic Eastern tradition; and it is definitely of a piece with contemporary work on the subject by Tom Clark and Wayne Stewart. (When I pointed this out to peacegirl in an effort to show her that Lessans was not alone in his thinking, she threw a great big hissy fit for reasons that remain obscure.)
This is one way that Lessans deals with Mishima’s “adumbrations of nothingness.” Ordinary people can’t come up with stuff like this — they are left to their own banal devices in dealing with their own inevitable existential crises: they respond by watching television, becoming sports fanatics, voting for Donald Trump, drinking their sorrows away, numbing themselves with opioids, etc. But like Miller, Lessans was not an ordinary man.
Even the light and sight stuff has a hidden point, regardless of the silliness of the scientific claims. (It must be noted that in the Authentic Text, Lessans did NOT claim that we see the light from the sun even before it arrives on earth; quite to the contrary, he maintained that we will not see the sun until eight minutes after it is turned on. Peacegirl
changed this passage, either out of malice or ignorance or both, and since then has spent an ungodly amount of time defending a strawman of her father’s original position.) To me, what Lessans is driving at here is that we all live in the present; NOW is all we have; the past and future are fictions. Who else has taught this? Buddhists.